January 31, 2008

Windows Vista - One Year Later

So, I finally gave in and made the switch to Vista.

Actually, if you've followed along on my blog, you'll see that I've actually attempted that a few times - a couple of those were even really early on. But I ran into a bunch of nasty problems very early on that really just precluded me from having any hope of truly switching to it for realz.

And then, over the past month or so I've made a couple of REAL attempts to get it to install as a dual-boot option. Mostly because I really wanted to take advantage of the SMB 2.0 goodness for communication back and forth between my server (which is running Windows 2008 RC0). See, between XP and my server I get about 15MB/sec transfer. But between 2 Win2k8 RC0 boxes (on a Gigabit switch) I was getting almost 80MB/sec. That, and I've heard some great things about Vista's stability in terms of video playback and editing - and since I'm doing more and more with Camtasia these days (more on that later), that seemed pretty tempting.

That, and *cough* because I was still being drawn like a moth to flame when it comes to Aero-Glass. (I mean hey, I've got a sweet rig with 2 killer video cards and 3 DVI monitors hooked up - why wouldn't I want some Aero-Glass love hooked up to that?)

But each of my REAL attempts at installing a dual partition over the past few months has just met with MISERABLE, STINKING, FAILURE. In each case, Vista just plain crashed after the first reboot during the installation process. No warnings, no BSOD, no errors, but most importantly: no LOVE. Three separate times I tried, still no luck.

On a whim I tried specifically loading drivers directly from the NVidia site to account for my RAID-0 (which shouldn't have been necessary - as the Vista installer was perfectly capable of seeing my RAID-0 and all of it's volumes - it was even able to format logical partitions). At any rate, that attempt ALSO crashed and burned. Only, when I rebooted after the crash and burn, Vista actually finished setting up, and then finally booted. (Whereas it hadn't done this the previous three times. ANd what's most baffling about the entire adventure is that of all the bad things I could have said about Vista over the last year, the Installer was easily one of the high-points: simple, elegant, fast and dependable - just not the last three times actually needed it to work).

That was then, This is NowAll my complaining aside, once I got Vista to finally 'take', the whole experience has been fantastic actually. For a change, ALLLLLLLLL of my software now works. No hoops, no problems, no warnings, no issues. It all just works. And on my hardware everything is very responsive and peppy. (I'm sadly at a total score of a 5.3 because my processor is only a dual-core 2.4GHz Core 2 Duo - but I'll swap that out for a quad-core 3.0 GHz (45nm) Wolfdale once those come out - otherwise disk and video are all at 5.9, and I need to slap some faster RAM in place too... but it's nothing to complain about at 5.5).)

I've also been really impressed by how stable things have been, and how WELL the audio and video handles in Vista as well. So far it's looking like it does a much better job of ensuring that audio and video don't get pre-empted, which is a HUGE win for me. And, without any tweaking I'm at about 50MB/second between my desktop and server which is also a huge boost.

Where I have taken a big hit though is with BattleField 2142. Apparently that game just isn't optimized very well to work with Vista. The video feels really smooth (compared to my XP box where the video occasionally feels a bit 'jerky'), but my frame-rate has strangely dropped by 20-50 FPS - which is a huge amount. That, and at points in the game my machine will just 'chug' or bog down to the point where game play gets really gross. But only for a few seconds. Which is weird, because XP never had any problems with that. Oh, and this is all after turning off Aero-Glass before playing. (Without doing that, playability just sucked - apparently it had something to do with painting two shiny windows with slick glass while keeping the carnage alive and well on my main monitor.)

So, that's primarily the only crappy thing I've bumped into with Vista - but given how much gaming I do (in comparison to other things) it's not that big of a deal. That, and while there ARE performance problems I'm hopeful that a bit of tuning will make them go away. Not to mention, even with those problems I'm still at the point where I'd happily deal with minor issues rather than reboot into XP.

Some IssuesOf course, you knew this was coming - even if I'm really happy with Vista, you just knew that I'd have to seriously COMPLAIN about a couple things.

Happily though, they basically only relate to Aero-Glass/Display.

The first thing I noticed was that, apparently, with my 3 monitor and 2 Video-Card setup, I'm apparently living so 'out there' on the fringe that MS doesn't want to acknowledge that people like me actually exist. (If ONLY I were actually that cool.) What am I complaining about? Vista's Dreamscape. You know - that spiffy bit of 'ultimate' functionality that lets you put video in as a background on your desktop? Right - watching home movies or MTV on your desktop would be either lame or distracting, but I was hoping to put some 'animated' video of the earth spinning, or some *cough* matrix-like characters falling onscreen and so on.

But noooo. Dreamscape no-worky with more than one display adapter. Talk about lame, and frankly, talk about useless. Dreamscape is a joke - because people with the kind of hardware to be able to actually use it (in a lot of cases) without suffering big performance hits, won't be able to actually use it. That's just dumb - and proof that MS apparently just wanted to get it out the door to get people to shut-up about the missing extras. Guess what? I'm still complaining ;)

The other thing I've noticed, which I can't help but feel is a cruel joke or hoax is the fact that my task bar loses transparency when I maximize ANY window. I mean, talk about idiotic - and apparently it's a known issue. Me? I maximize a few things - that's one of the benefits of having 3 monitors - I can take advantage of lots of real-estate. Only when I do, my taskbar becomes opaque. If I un-maximize everything, voila! transparency. Re-maximize? Opacity. It feels like a cruel joke - and when I first realized what was going on, I had to look around my office for the hidden cameras (as it would have been a MUCH nicer outcome had this actually been a prank rather than some 'design' of the OS).

Yeah, I know - this 'issue' won't kill me. But come on, they actually shipped it like this? And one year later they haven't fixed it?

Maybe that will be part of the secret sauce that they're releasing on Feb 4th as part of SP1.